As Westerners, we believe in pushing up against the limits, and going over them. We max ourselves out in every facet of our lives until there is no more margin left.

Hara Hachi Bu

Sometimes it feels like our brain waits the very last minute to remind us about the things our body requires to function properly. It’s only when you get the alert from your body that you know you went too far. When you forget to drink regularly or when you eat too much food in one go, the only alerts you get are the symptoms, you feel thirsty or you feel sick. It’s at that moment you realize you went too far but that’s already too late. It’s the same with our energy, it’s only when we accumulate too much fatigue, pressure or worries that we feel the after-effects. As a pattern, we can observe our tendency to push too far the limits in many aspects of our life. Unsurprisingly, work is often in the Top 3 and is causing more and more people to experience some kind of burn-out. As a result, we can feel weak on a recurring basis or worse, get completely locked up out of the blue. But should this be a fatality? No, there might be a way to fix that. Justin Jackson made me discover the existence of the « Hara Hachi Bu » philosophy. This Japanese sentence literally means « eat until you are 80% full. » The people of Okinawa Island use this principle and eat only about 80% of the calories they need. Research shows that those people have a better life expectancy. This leads Justin to realize how this philosophy could have a good impact on our life if we would apply it to our energy. If our brain can’t play the role of a safeguard, it seems like we have to mindfully monitor our energy. I must admit, monitoring our energy is not an easy task. It’s not as functional as drinking water every 15 minutes even if you’re not thirsty. Energy is fluctuant and unstable over time. But our energy is so precious and crucial that it makes sense to aim for a life habit that could save us some hard time. There is no reason why we should always end up siphoning our energy until exhaustion and suffer from being tired repeatedly.